After a two-year battle with Charles Schwab & Co., San Francisco comedian Tissa Hami finally has something to smile about.

Last week, a financial arbitration panel awarded her $9,356, plus interest and fees, almost making up for her losses when the Schwab fund she had been assured was safe went kaput in 2008.

"I'm thrilled with the result, but I don't think I've conveyed how miserable they made my life," said the Iranian-born Hami.

It also marks another victory for the USFInvestor Justice Clinic, which goes to bat for aggrieved small investors, like Hami, that private attorneys, looking for fatter payouts, are disinclined to represent.

"It's a big problem for anyone who loses money under $100,000" in questionable investment schemes, said the clinic's director, Robert Talbot, a University of San Francisco law professor.

Since its inception nine years ago, when Enron was all over the news, the clinic, funded by USF's law school and outside grants, has clawed back close to $800,000 for its clients, all free of charge. Small potatoes, perhaps, but important enough for people who can't afford to lose them.

"We'll handle cases as low as $1,000," Talbot said. "We look to help anybody who can't get a lawyer."

'For people like you': Hami's case is one of dozens referred to the project by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an independent agency that runs an arbitration system better suited to handle cases like Hami's.

Hami, 36, who describes herself as "absolutely not a risk taker," says she was persuaded by an insistent Schwab broker to invest the money she been depositing with Schwab for 10 years into a fund she said the broker guaranteed was "for people like you, conservative. Safe as a money market, with a slightly higher return."

Returning from her aunt's funeral in Iran in March 2008, she opened her latest Schwab statement to discover she was down $13,000. "I thought it was a typo. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I couldn't believe my money was gone."

What Hami now knows was that her money had been put in Schwab's infamous $13 billion YieldPlus fund - backed, unbeknownst to most investors, by hinky mortgage-backed securities - which melted down when the financial markets collapsed.

'Fought tooth and nail': As of August 2009, Schwab had paid out

$21 million in client claims and arbitration awards involving its YieldPlus bond fund. It also faces a consolidated class-action suit led by the Berkeley office of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP.

The suit is scheduled for a summary judgment hearing this week in federal court in San Francisco. On Friday, the SEC filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the plaintiffs.

David Weiskopf, a Schwab spokesman, did not comment on the Hami case, but said the company "has won over half of the cases that have gone to arbitration so far, including 10 out of the last 12."

He added that "in 29 YieldPlus cases, arbitration panels have awarded zero damages to plaintiffs, and in only six have plaintiffs been awarded the amount they requested." Weiskopf said the suits filed against Schwab "are completely without merit" and that the company "continues to defend itself vigorously in court."

Talbot, who said Schwab "fought tooth and nail" in the Hami case, has two more Schwab cases on his docket, which he said "involve the same product and the same misleading broker pitch."

Meanwhile, he and his students at the project have plenty of other cases, primarily involving elderly investors, who are misled, or not told, about the "unsuitability" - as defined by FINRA - of the investments into which they are being put. Biggest "Beware" sign these days, says Talbot: variable annuities.

Hami, listed in last Sunday's Chronicle as one of the top female comedians in the country (although she isn't making much more annually than the settlement she got) is not sure if she'll work her experience with Schwab into her act. ( www.tissahami.com)

"We'll see. We'll see."

-- For more information on the Investor Justice Clinic and its services, go to sfgate.com/ZJKB.